31 January 2019 3:46 PM

Some Reflections on 'The Battle of the Villa Fiorita' by Rumer Godden

Authors who were immensely popular the day before yesterday can vanish completely in an amazingly short time. Sometimes there’s a good reason for this, that their books were never any good in the first place and the author was just fashionable. Of how many of today’s grand literary successes will this be true? Sometimes they just fall out of fashion. I’ve discussed the extraordinary shrivelling of Hugh Walpole, from giant to nobody, elsewhere. https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/08/holiday-reading.html

In my parents’ generation a writer called Charles Morgan was immensely successful with a book called ‘The Judge’s Story’. I have tried more than once to read it, and simply could not keep going. Yet this was once a very popular book. I am missing something, I am sure. There is a mystery here, in the atmosphere in which people live and the things they think are important and the way they say them, which alters the way in which they see, read (and hear in their heads) the words of authors. There is just so much more subtlety in the world than we can begin to see.

Anyway, this is just to explain how I came to be reading a novel called ‘The Battle of the Villa Fiorita’ by an author very successful in the 1940s and 1950s, called Rumer Godden. You may have heard of her ‘Black Narcissus’, made into a successful film in another age. Let me be honest, I’d been put off this author’s work before by a feeling that she was a little churchy, more preoccupied by nuns than anyone ought to be; and also by an unreasonable irritation with her name. ‘Rumer Godden’. It looks as if it is on backwards, just as a bald man with a beard looks as if he has put his head on upside down. But even if you try it the other way round, it still looks wrong : ‘Godden Rumer’.Which is the Christian name? Which the surname? On such trivia do so many choices hang.

I found myself reading it last Sunday, as I spent a pleasant day in the ultra-liberal Sussex town of Lewes, waiting for my slot at the festival there. Threatened with a rail-replacement bus service, I’d decided to head there the night before and make a day of it. Lewes is a lovely town, full of interesting and pleasing things. You can feel the cleansing power of the nearby sea, in the wind which blew quite strongly all that day. It has surrounding hills to climb, a moody river to walk alongside, a Prayer Book church, one of Southern England’s best breweries, hundreds of unspoiled buildings, a melancholy war memorial, a ruined castle and plenty of cafes and quiet pubs in which to sit and read.

And so I did. ‘The Battle of the Villa Fiorita’ had me almost from the start because it evoked (as Elizabeth Taylor’s books – no, not that one, another Elizabeth Taylor - also do) the way the late 1950s and early 1960s actually felt, for someone of my age and class. There is the settled respectable feeling of home and beauty in a prosperous southern village. There is the faint but abiding feeling that, despite the loveliness of the surroundings and the well-maintained traditions there is a shortage of money in the background. There is the heavy grandeur of the military classes, still faintly glowing form the glory of the war. There is the kindly but strict formality of adults with children. There is the austere duty of attending boarding school, sprawling across half the year, a thing both parents and children do because they think they must, not because they want to. And despite all the evidence that it is about to go down the plughole and that foreigners think us funny for doing it, there is still that Protestant serious austerity, knowledge of Bible and Prayer Book, fear and dislike of divorce.

And it is divorce and its attendant miseries (in days when it was still a rarity) which are the battleground here. Without the divorce, the story might be a typical children’s adventure, a boy and a girl travelling bravely across Europe on a mission of rescue. In fact it reminded me of all those nice Puffin children’s books I used to read, in which the children do indeed come to the rescue.

But it is, emphatically, not a children’s book. The children are trying not to find a buried treasure or foil a burglar. They are trying to win their mother back, and restore their broken home, after she has deserted their distinguished but poor and dull Army officer father for a charming, rich film director, now lodging in a lakeside villa in Italy.

The children are already suffering the miseries (easy to laugh at, but real enough) of distressed gentlefolk. The country home has gone, the little girl’s pony, a prize in a competition, is confined to distant stables, they must live in a horrible, bleak modern flat instead of amid the spacious, well-worn and shabby splendour of a solid house in the country set in its own gardens.

But this is only part of the point. The boy and girl, he a 14-year-old on the very brink of adolescence, she not yet 12, are broken by the rupture of their parents’ marriage.

The story begins as, exhausted, dusty, penniless and miserable, (and in one case ill) they arrive on the doorstep of the Italian villa where their mother is cohabiting with her film director boyfriend. I will not tell you (because you may read the book, and I would advise you to because it is a good story well-told), exactly how they have made this journey.

But every detail of the novel evokes a world just before travel was easy, a world when foreign countries were still wholly foreign, in look, and smell and taste and weight and shape, and we did not know what their food was or what it was called, when we viewed their Roman Catholic religion as only slightly less exotic and mysterious than Islam is to us now. Yes, it was beautiful, often, but it was also very, very strange. We had been growing apart for 400 long years, and we were not ‘Europeans’.

And by doing so it calls into mind a Britain immensely more British than it is now, and British people whose instincts are so British that they are now foreign to us (though they are familiar to me, being only very lightly buried in my memory, and having for many years been my own).

Quite a lot of the book is bitter. There are marvellous moments of emotional struggle – a delicious pudding served to the little girl in a luxurious Italian hotel restaurant, an almond tart, lovely to east but hateful to remember, as it is part of a very cleverly managed attempt to win her round. But she knows this, and it will taste, ever afterwards of treason.

I am not sure what Rumer Godden (herself divorced and remarried) was really meaning to convey by this book (later filmed). It may even be that its message and outcome are inb fact the opposite of what they seem to be. I have no way of finding out. There are moments which are remarkably frank for the early 1960s in which it was written and in which I think it I set. These are not crude or explicit, but the knowing adult mind quickly uncovers their carnal significance, and this is especially hard to take when they are seen through the mind of the 14-year-old boy, just on the edge of awakening (as boys of that age were then).

But what stays in the memory is a timeless contest between duty and pleasure, between restraint and indulgence, between the warm south and the chilly north, in which I suspect most modern people will have no difficulty at all in taking the side of the warm south, but in which I am greatly torn, and always will be.

Share this article:

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

"As long as a society's best minds were occupied by theological questions, it was possible to speak of a given religion as the way of thinking of the whole social organism. All the matters which most actively concerned the people were referred to it and discussed in its terms. But that belongs to a dying era. We have come by easy stages to a lack of a common system of thought that could unite the peasant cutting his hay, the student poring over formal logic, and the mechanic working in an automobile factory. Out of this lack arises the painful sense of detachment or abstraction that oppresses the "creators of culture."
- Czeslaw Milosz

I'm not sure if Roman Catholicism was viewed as foreign for its sense of abstractions, but this quote sprung to mind.

It sounds well worth the read. I certainly understand your point about some distant books being just that too far in the past for one to fully enjoy. I know Lewis. It is a lovely place, not far from my parents and along the route to Brighton. We used to call there when my dad had an antiquarian book company, it was one of his haunts for finding stock and was a midway point to the mariner where his boat was, so killed two birds with one stone, so to speak. There's also quite an imposing court house which has seen a fair share of Sussex proceedings which you must have seen.

"... absolutely the finest beer produced by humans anywhere in the world today."

I might have thought about seeking out a bottle or two, but the manner of your statement led to second thoughts.

'Absolutely' suggests you've tried all the others, 'produced by humans' left me wondering if there are any beers produced by animals, and 'anywhere in the world' left me questioning if any person who's tried all the others could possibly be in fit state to pass judgement!

When it comes to authors who have recently fallen into comparative obscurity, I often wish you would write more about Keith Waterhouse. I read and re-read Billy Liar and a collection of his columns called Monday, Thursdays in my youth. Later, I read a book of his called Office Life which was very original. I didn't love all his writing, but it seems a shame that he is so neglected, and as you have mentioned him in passing on many occasions it would be great to read a blog post about him.

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the moderator has approved them. They must not exceed 500 words. Web links cannot be accepted, and may mean your whole comment is not published.